Lab-made food may hit menu
It looks real. Will consumers buy it?
The cheeseburger, a staple of the summer cookout, could be getting a makeover.
Nearly three years ago, Mark Post and a team of scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands introduced a futuristic lab-grown burger that cost $325,000. San Francisco-based Memphis Meats has created its own “cultured meat” with a price tag of $18,000 a pound (compared with grocer Hy-Vee, which recently advertised 85% lean ground beef for $4.99 a pound).
The goal to change where meat — a mainstay of the human diet — and other animal-derived foods come from could have a jolting effect on modern agriculture if researchers can rein in the cost, maintain flavor and persuade consumers to buy it.
“It will eventually have so many advantages that I can’t imagine that it will leave a market for livestock beef,” said Post, a meat lover who enjoys a filet mignon medium-rare. “If this is affordable and scalable, I would absolutely give up eating meat, livestock beef, no question.”
Post conceded his new-age burger introduced three years ago was far from perfect.
Since then, he has worked to improve the beef by conditioning it to express its natural vibrantred color and cultivating fat tissue to boost the taste.
The meat, which is grown in a lab using stem cells taken from the muscle of a live cow, looks the same as the real thing under a microscope.
It could be available to some consumers as early as 2020, he said, but anyone interested in trying one will need to be willing to pay up.
“It will be kind of an expensive product, (too much) for the supermarket but more for the highend restaurant or specialty stores,” Post said of the early challenge he expects the new product to have. “Who’s going to buy a $10 hamburger in the supermarket? Probably not many.”
Increasingly, a growing number of companies and academic researchers such as Post are abandoning the traditional animal in favor of the lab, working to churn out everything from milk and eggs to meat and animal-based products such as leather.
Driven by consumer demand for food raised more sustainably — requiring less land and water, emitting less greenhouse gases, and in a way that is considered more humane for the animal — much of the work is still in early stages.
But researchers are confident that products close to or identical to their traditional counterparts could start popping up in stores within a few years.
“More than anything we want to provide an alternative to people who want to consume products that align with their values, their environmental conscience and, ultimately, products that are a good source of protein without all the baggage,” said Arturo Elizondo, chief executive of Clara Foods.
The company started work in 2015 on an animalfree egg white that takes water, yeast and sugar, and converts them using a fermentation process similar to the one used to make beer or wine.
The start-up estimates the market for egg whites in the U.S. is more than $3 billion.
With the egg industry battered by a 2010 salmonella outbreak that sickened thousands and the bird flu virus that destroyed millions of birds last year, including 30 million laying hens in Iowa alone, Elizondo said the popular baking product is in need of a better alternative.
Not everyone is convinced livestock will be put out to pasture.
Lester Wilson, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Iowa State University, said he was doubtful that meats, cheeses, eggs and other products raised in a lab could gain an audience beyond a niche market.
The technology will likely need to overcome many of the same obstacles that plague new inventions, including reducing costs to make the product competitive with existing items, meeting regulatory hurdles and persuading skeptical consumers to abandon traditional food sources for those that some view as better suited to
The Jetsons or Star Trek. “It is similar to any new product that comes out in that it has to be not only proven safe, but that it is a quality product,” said Wilson. “It’s going to require some (consumer) education, and we know in some cases that doesn’t even work.”
A 2015 study by researchers at Arizona State University and three other schools said that even though growing meat in the lab might be viewed as friendlier to animals, the environmental reality may be far more complicated.
While less feed and land would be needed, the researchers speculated that growing cultured meat could require more heat and electricity to produce the product in a sterile environment, resulting in greater greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally raised pork and poultry. One exception is likely in beef, where methane produced by cows could give the lab an environmental advantage.
The beef industry downplayed any impact from cultured meat.
Tracy Brunner, president of the National Cattlemen Beef ’s Association, said he didn’t consider the lab product “a threat, because it’s not beef.” The industry “believe(s) that beef comes from an animal raised by a rancher and that is the product that both our domestic and international customers demand,” he said.
At New Harvest, a non-profit that funds academic research on cellular agriculture, donations have soared from $38,000 in 2013 to $600,000 a year ago; it is expecting to top $1 million in 2016, said Isha Datar, its president and chief executive.
The organization uses the money to fund publicly accessible research on growing animal products without the animal.
Datar said that while she’s pleased to see growing interest in products like cultured meat, she warned that much of the hype is premature due to a dearth of scientists in the field and the traditionally slow pace of research in biotechnology.
“I don’t think we need to tap our brakes, I just think we need to make sure our expectations are appropriate,” Datar said. “I’m approaching this as science instead of a promise. The reason why I’m doing this work is because I think these are questions worth asking and not because I think cultured meat is going to save all of us.”
Those on the animal-free food train are optimistic people will embrace a new definition of food.
‘We want to provide ... products that are a good source of protein without all the baggage.” Arturo Elizondo, chief executive of Clara Foods